Superstorm Sandy: Power still out at Ellis Island; 2 million historic objects to be moved from site

NEW YORK - Power is still out at Ellis Island more than a month after Hurricane Sandy walloped New York City, prompting federal officials to remove some 1.7 million historic objects from the museum at the site where more than 12 million immigrants first arrived to the United States.

"The vast majority are paper documents, immigration records, letters, diaries left behind," said Mike Litterst, a spokesman for the National Park Service. "But then there's a substantial part of the collection that is actual objects like trunks brought over by immigrant families."

Litterst called the move "pre-emptive," and said the objects at the Immigration Museum were not damaged in the storm, nor have they deteriorated since. But because the building has been without electricity for several weeks, there are growing concerns about documents and artifacts being outside of a climate-controlled environment.

"With no power, they can't effectively regulate the environmental conditions and the temperature and humidity are fluctuating," Litterst said. "The other concern along those lines - because it's heated with boilers in the winter - if they can't get that up and running and it gets cold enough, God forbid that a pipe bursts."

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The National Park Service reported "significant damage" to the infrastructure on Ellis Island, including "severely damaged" doors, windows and exhibits at the Ferry Building. A fire suppression system also was threatened, and water flooded the basement of the Immigration Building, according to the agency.

Teams of curators have monitored the historic treasures since almost immediately after the storm, Litterst said. The National Park Service has made a point of including history experts in disaster assessment teams since 2003, when flooding from Hurricane Isabel damaged or destroyed as much as 90 percent of about 1 million cultural artifacts in Jamestown, Va.

Officials haven't finalized how the artifacts from Ellis Island will be transported, or how much it will cost. The objects will not be available to the public while they're kept in a secure location in Maryland, Litterst said.

"It is not a permanent move, not by any stretch of the imagination," Litterst said. "The collection survived the storm intact... But they made the determination that if we don't do something now, maybe there's going to be a problem later on."

Officials say they don't know when Ellis Island will be re-opened, but that it won't be before the end of the 2012. The Statue of Liberty nearby weathered the storm without problems and sustained no damage, Litterst said. In a stroke of luck, an exhibit housed there had been moved about a year ago for a renovation.

"The statue, the pedestal she sits on, and the base at the bottom, the water did not reach any of those areas," Litterst said. "We've had a lot of trying times but the statue herself was not harmed."